Epilogue

Pamela and I were married on January 29, 2000—almost a year to the day after I answered her call. I’m not sure if it was love at first sight because after all she still couldn’t see very well. I do remember when I first met her at Starbucks, she was dressed all in black, a denim shirt against a mesh see-through top. Her skin was pale, almost white, her long black hair swung side to side falling over each shoulder as she tried to keep it out of her face. Her lips were red like a black widow’s belly leaving crimson stains on a long green straw. She was tapping her nails on a small wooden table when I walked up beside her and asked to sit down. “You’re late,” she said, then blew me off for the next few minutes. That was Pam, sassy from the very beginning!

Though we’ve been happily married now for almost twenty years, our life hasn’t always been easy as the trials we’ve been through together would fill up a book—but now I’m getting ahead of myself. Yet through it all our faith has sustained us and “having done all to stand,” we are standing therefore—a cord of two strands, an unbreakable bond, an ally, a partner, a lover, a friend, that’s who we are to each other.

One day in April of 2012 my 1994 Jeep Wrangler, having nearly traveled to the moon and back, was going the way of all pistons and steel. So, after finding a newer one that I liked, I called the guy and asked him if I could go out and see it. He told me that he closed at six, but if I could get there in forty-five minutes he’d stay there and wait. Then I asked my wife if she wanted to go look at it with me.

“Sure,” she said, then I told her it was out in Montclair.

“That’s okay.”

“But we need to get there in forty-five minutes.”

“So what is it that you’re trying to tell me?”

“We’ll need to take some kind of short cut.”

“That’s impossible, there’s only one way to avoid the 91 freeway and that’s…”

Then we both said it out loud together: “Carbon Canyon Road.”

I watched for a moment as all of the color drained from her body as if she was reliving the day that was three days short of its twenty-seventh anniversary. Then she steadied herself and gave me a look like the ones that I’ve seen on her face many times before, the ones that had told me it was time for me to stand back and get out of her way.

“You know you can always stay home if you want.” I offered. “You know, if you think that it’s still too soon.”

Clenching her fists, she looked back at me, snatched up her purse and said, “Fuck it, let’s go!”

As Lambert Road started to narrow as it wound past the park and alongside of the golf course, I could see my wife sitting next to me, eyes tightly closed, her right hand locked onto the roll bar, and her lips moving as if reciting a prayer. After dancing along the side of an abandoned mineral hot springs, we crested the top of a hill then sliced through a forest of oak—twisted limbs of mangled trees dangling their threats along either side as I shifted from fifth down to third, weaving through spring-colored hills painted green by a recent series of storms, my engine both whining and humming as we dropped for a moment only to climb up again as the road began bobbing and weaving in a series of turns. After a long steady rise, we finally made it into the hairpins. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring giving way to Clair De Lune as the highway straightened into a long gentle grade that carried us down to checkerboard streets and suburban homes laid out on a grid framed by distant rolling green hills as Carbon Canyon Road took on the less ominous moniker—Chino Hills Parkway.

“There, that wasn’t so bad,” I said as I looked at my wife still shaking and gasping as we took our place in a long line of cars that waited for the light at the 71.

“Would you please change the music?” she asked. “You know play something different?”

So I ejected my CD from out of the player, turned on the radio and flipped through the stations until a song came on that I remembered was really popular then, the one where the guy in the video fades into a painting and him and his girlfriend find themselves awash in a progression of green and brown slashes until the girl finally sets herself free and is standing there naked with her back to the camera.

“That’s good,” she said. “Leave it right there.”

Turning her head toward the window, she slowly reached up for the zipper and with a mischievous grin, pulled it open and screamed out at the top her lungs, “Fuck you Lost Eyes! Damn you to hell!”

Then when the light changed to green, and the cars up ahead let go of their brakes, and the bright red wall that once held us back started moving forward again, she turned back around and looked out at the hills.

“You didn’t get me! You hear me? You didn’t get me! ‘For greater is He that is in us’…”

She never completed her sentence. We made it in time and drove back home in a “new” 2001 Jeep Wrangler. I remember it was geared pretty low and it took me a while to get used to the shifting, but I got a great deal, and to this day I still have the car. We didn’t take the canyon back home. By that time, the freeway was far less crowded, so there wasn’t the need. In fact, neither of us have ever been back, having already reconquered that road—a cruel stretch of ungoverned pavement that forever altered both of our lives.